East Coast Internet Outage…Yikes!

Were you not able to access some popular sites on October 21st? Many sites were unavailable for usage due to a cyber attack. These sites included Amazon, Spotify, Twitter, Netflix, and PayPal.

This attack is known as an DDos attack. What is DDos? Distributed Denial of Service, it is an attack when a web service is intentionally overwhelmed by traffic from many sources. It is a common method for digital assaults. This assault was on DYN an Internet Traffic Company. According to CNBC, the attacks were “well planned and executed, coming from tens of millions of IP addresses at the same time.” The attack was waged from devices infected with a malware code that was released on the web in the past month, this includes DVR’s . The attack was curbed within two hours, yet, how many devices do we have that can be used for such an attack? Is this attack due to the current election? Take time to make sure that your webcam and DVR’s have the latest firmware and software updates strictly from the manufacturer, to help prevent this in the future.